What the Hell

Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel.

Why is a fourteenth-century allegorical poem about sin and redemption still such a draw?Credit Illustration by John Elliott, “Dante in Exile” (1904) / Print Collection / NYPL

People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You’d think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students.

In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literature—notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—many sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,” he wrote. “There is no third.” A lot of literary people then ran out to learn some Italian, a language for which, previously, many had had scant respect, and a great surge of Dante translations began. In some—Laurence Binyon’s (1933-43), Dorothy Sayers’s (1949-62)—the translator even tried to use Dante’s rhyme scheme, terza rima (aba bcb cdc, etc.), a device almost impossible to manage in English, because our language, compared with Italian, has so few rhymes. Since then, we have had many kinds of Divine Comedy—lowbrow, highbrow, muscly, refined. The more fastidious ones, the ones that actually try to give equivalents for Dante’s words, are in prose, because in prose the translator doesn’t have to sacrifice accuracy to such considerations as rhyme and rhythm. As for verse translations, they may be less accurate, but it can be argued that they are more faithful than prose versions. The Divine Comedy, after all, is a poem, and its meanings are contained as much in sound as in “sense.” Verse translations require more courage, and more thinking, because they are generally more interpretive. Within the past year, two more have been published, one by the American poet Mary Jo Bang, the other by the Australian essayist and poet Clive James.

In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to rhyme, in quatrains (in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were no more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance, repetition. He says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar (her book “Reading Dante” will be out next year), pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine Comedy had to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness of sound, as word after word, line after line, beckoned the next and thus kept the reader moving forward. James says this is what he was intent on, above all.

All is a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dante’s text and to incorporate background material. He didn’t want footnotes—nothing should stop the reader. Many things do, though. Here are Dante’s famous opening lines:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

And here is James’s rendering:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound

I still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—

Merely to think of it renews the fear.

“Keening sound”? If ever there was a forced rhyme, this is it. Also, Dante didn’t say anything about wailing, only about fear, and the two are different matters.

Soon the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide, Virgil, arrive at the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:

Per me si va ne la città dolente,

per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

James translates this as:

To enter the lost city, go through me.

Through me you go to meet a suffering

unceasing and eternal. You will be

with people who, through me, lost everything.

My maker, moved by justice, lives above.

Through him, the holy power, I was made—

made by the height of wisdom and first love,

whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.

From now on, every day feels like your last

Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.

Your future now is to regret the past.

Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.

This shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James has lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion about what the gate is telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think that we have a choice about whether or not to enter. We don’t, and that is what makes going to Hell a serious business.

From what I can tell, these two problems, awkwardness and inaccuracy, are due to exactly the thing that sounded so nice when James told us about it in the introduction, his intention to capture the phonetic richness of Dante’s lines. Worse are the demands made by the internal echoes. In the Hell-gate inscription, there’s almost no word that isn’t singing a duet, or more. We have “through me” / “through me”; “suffering” / “unceasing” / “everything”; “me” / “me” / “meet” / “be” / “people”; “maker” / “moved” / “made”; “him” / “holy.” And that’s just in the first six lines. The technique asks a great deal: that the translator obey, simultaneously, the summons both of English-language sounds and of Dante’s meaning.

Still, the freedoms James takes allow him to get off some beautiful phrases. When the pilgrim realizes that his guide is Virgil, his idol, he says to him, “Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte / che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?” James turns this into “Are you Virgil? Are you the spring, the well, / The fountain and the river in full flow / Of eloquence that sings like a seashell / Remembering the sea and the rainbow?” I love that seashell, and the rainbow. Neither is in Dante. James is a poet, doing a poet’s work. Also, however interested he is in being fancy, he can be plain as well, sometimes poignantly so.

See the last line of the Hell-gate inscription: “Forget your hopes. They are what brought you here.” The second sentence is not in the original poem, but it is wonderful, both sarcastic and sad. James is also a premier practitioner of the high-low style that became so popular in the nineteen-twenties, notably via Eliot and Pound, which is to say, in part, via Dante. He can be colloquial. Of the she-wolf that blocks the pilgrim’s path, Virgil says, “In a bad mood it can kill, / And it’s never in a good mood.” (This could be from “The Sopranos.”) James likes, iconoclastically, to do this sort of thing with the grandees, like Francesca da Rimini, who says to the pilgrim, “What you would have us say / Let’s hear about.” It’s all rich and strange.

Mary Jo Bang, a poet and a professor of English at Washington University, in St. Louis, has much the same purpose: to convey Dante’s internal music. Unlike James, she has made some major sacrifices to this end. In her Inferno (Graywolf), the only canticle she has taken on so far, she does not use end rhyme, and she does not hold herself to any regular metre. (James used iambic pentameter.) But, having cast off those restraints, she adopts another one. James was trying, he said, to be true to Dante. Bang is trying to be true to contemporary life, to the “post-9/11, Internet-ubiquitous present.” As this implies, she aims to be faithful to something else as well: undergraduates. She writes, “I will be most happy if this postmodern, intertextual, slightly slant translation lures readers to a poetic text that might seem otherwise archaic and off-putting”—especially, I presume, to nineteen-year-olds. On the surface, this appears to be a laudable purpose, but whenever you hear those words “true to contemporary life,” run for cover.

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The trouble starts on the first page. The pilgrim speaks of his relief upon issuing from the dark wood. He says that he felt like a person who, almost drowned at sea, arrives, panting, on the shore. Bang places him, instead, at the edge of a swimming pool. But these two things—the ocean and the neighborhood pool—are nowhere near the same, and every nineteen-year-old knows what the ocean is. Other anachronisms create worse problems. Bang, in her lines, includes references to Freud, Mayakovsky, Colbert, you name it. She picks up swatches of verse from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. But, if readers get into the swing of these, what are they going to do when they encounter the Roman Catholic theology that is the spine of the Divine Comedy, and which Bang says, in her introduction, that she will honor? (“God has to look down from Heaven; Satan has to sit at the center of Hell.”) Wouldn’t it be better if she let the reader know that there are old things as well as new things—that there is such a thing as history? She is not unaware of this, as her learned footnotes demonstrate. Why is she keeping it from her readers? If they knew it, they might find out who Mayakovsky is, which I doubt that they have done.

Oddly, given Bang’s stated aims, she’s happy to court obscurity. She says that the she-wolf that detains the pilgrim outside the wood has a “bitch-kitty” face; Virgil tells the pilgrim to climb the “meringue-pie mountain” that lies ahead. “Bitch-kitty” gets an explanatory footnote: Bang says it’s something that she found in the Dictionary of American Slang. My edition of that book says “bitch kitty” was a phrase of the nineteen-thirties and forties. (Roughly, it meant a “humdinger.”) Did Bang expect today’s readers to know it? Not really, it seems. She says that she wants these oddities to be fleeting pleasures for us. To me, they’re not pleasures, but just oddities, something like finding a Tootsie Roll in the meat loaf.

Translators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring a solo show about the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games. As of last week, their company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, “Inferno” (Doubleday).

In many ways, the new book is like Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code.” Here, as there, we have Brown’s beloved “symbologist,” Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker of Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking woman—this one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q. of 208—while people shoot at them. All this transpires in exotic climes—Florence, Venice, and Istanbul—upon which, even as the two are fleeing a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: “The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolò Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti.” Or: “No trip to the piazza was complete without sipping an espresso at Caffè Rivoire.”

As we saw in “The Da Vinci Code,” there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that Brown doesn’t like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He’s also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman’s black arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike “The Da Vinci Code” and Brown’s “Angels and Demons” (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western world’s most famous eschatological thriller, Dante’s Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by the sequence of events in Dante’s poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever he feels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying things like “I am life” and “I am death.” Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly. The book’s villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dante’s death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, “The path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that.”

The hellfire material makes the book colorful and creepy. It also sounds notes of conspiracy. (The villain, with his “Transhumanist philosophy,” has many followers.) Religion and paranoia have a lot in common: above all, the belief that something big is going on out there and also that everything means something else. Further, both religion and paranoia are short on empirical evidence, so that greater faith is required. Finally, the conviction that everything refers to something else generates codes and symbols, which is what generates Robert Langdon. As a symbologist, he can read these runes. Often, the clue they give him does not point him to what he’s looking for but rather to something that will offer a further clue, which will get him a little closer to what he’s looking for, and so on, as in a treasure hunt.

That process is the plot, or at least the skeleton of it. It is then fleshed out with a million details: dreams, murders, priceless paintings. There is a yacht lurking off the Adriatic coast, where, for vast fees, sinister, tight-lipped men arrange for governments to change, wars to be hushed up, and the like. Meanwhile, we are given lessons in how to do ancient mosaics and how to make a death mask. We are introduced to products galore: Plume Paris glasses, Volvo motors, Juicy Couture sweatsuits, even a “Swedish Sectra Tiger XS personal voice-encrypting phone, which had been redirected through four untraceable routers.” Page after page, things keep coming at you. People who sit down to read “Inferno” should bring a notepad.

The book has almost no psychology, because one of Brown’s favorite plot devices is to reveal, mid-novel, that a character presented all along as a friend is in fact an enemy (see Leigh Teabing in “The Da Vinci Code”), or vice versa. To do that—and it’s always pretty exciting—Brown can’t give his characters much texture; if he did, they would be too hard to flip. Of course, without texture they don’t have anything interesting to say, except maybe “Stop the plane there.” The dialogue is dead. As for the rest of the writing, it is not dead or alive. It has no distinction whatsoever. Because “Inferno” transpires in so many glamorous places, Brown may rise to the grandiose. In Hagia Sophia, he speaks of the “staggering force of its enormity,” and barely a page passes without italics. But this is to relieve the general coldness.

No, Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated than usual, because although Langdon, with his trusted Brooks, is looking for something, he’s not quite sure what it is. Meanwhile, from one side he’s being chased by the storm troopers—black-clad thugs, with umlauts over their names—and from the other by Vayentha, the lady with the Swedish Sectra Tiger XS. There’s also a reconnaissance drone buzzing through the sky, telling them where to find Langdon.

Too bad for them, because our hero knows more secret tunnels than you can shake a stick at. At one point, it takes Brown twenty pages to get Langdon and Brooks, in Florence, up and down the Palazzo Vecchio’s hidden passages: through the corridor behind the Armenia panel in the Hall of Geographical Maps, into the cupboard in the Architectural Models room, down the Duke of Athens stairway, and so on. Never does the story slow down, though. Brown gives us extremely short chapters (often just two or three pages) and constant cross-cutting. He also adores cliff-hangers. One of the storm troopers calls his superior: “ ‘It’s Brüder,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got an ID on the person helping Langdon.’ ‘Who is it?’ his boss replied. Brüder exhaled slowly. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ ” Cut to Vayentha, who thinks she’s been fired for failing to kill Langdon and is revving her motorcycle disconsolately. She’s not the person helping Langdon, though. She’s something else, which you have to figure out.

The book ends weakly, because Langdon—and Brown, too, clearly—actually sympathizes with the villain, or at least with his motives. And those who are familiar with Brown’s previous books will not be surprised that the boy doesn’t get the girl. Brooks clearly wishes it were otherwise. “You’ll know where to find me,” she says, as she and Langdon part, and then she kisses him on the lips. He gives her a big hug and puts her on the plane. In “The Da Vinci Code,” Langdon’s companion, Sophie Neveu, turned out to be a descendant of Jesus, and this made the question of a romance between them a tricky business. Brooks is free, though. Maybe Langdon is gay.

For all its absurdities, Brown’s book is a comfort, because it proves that the Divine Comedy is still alive in our culture. The same is true, on a higher level, of the James and the Bang translations. Take James. He probably gave us more oddities—outrages, even—than he would have with a less famous text. Surely he knew the number and the excellence of his predecessors. But he is seventy-three and ailing, so, if he said to himself, “What the hell, let’s just do it,” you can see why. As for Bang, she’s not seventy-three (she’s sixty-seven), but if she has taught the Divine Comedy she has unquestionably faced a lot of young people saying, “What?” “What?” You can’t blame her for trying to do something about that. At least she cares. All of us should worry about her students, though. They’re going to go off thinking that Dante wrote about meringue-pie mountains, and this is wrong. Furthermore, there is no reason that they couldn’t have faced the mountain without the pie, and the fourteenth century without the twenty-first.

Thankfully, because the original text survives more faithful translations will keep coming. Indeed, they have. The edition by Jean and Robert Hollander (2000-07) is both accurate and beautiful. I don’t think any general reader, or any student of Mary Jo Bang’s, needs more than this. But if Bang—and James, and even Brown—disagrees, so be it. As long as Dante is here, and the text is available, why shouldn’t they have some fun? ♦

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